Lake News

by Barbara Delinsky

  Then the stairs creaked and she glanced up. Hannah was there on the top step, looking hesitant and unsure. When Lily waved her down, the hesitancy vanished. Quickly and lightly, she ran down the steps and sat beside Lily.

  At first, neither of them spoke. Finally, in a soft whisper and with the shyest of smiles, Hannah said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  For a split second, looking at that face—yes, a beautiful face—Lily was glad she was, too.

  As accidents went, this one was middle of the road. Neither worker was seriously injured, though both suffered enough fractures and contusions to count them out for the rest of the harvest. Since the orchard made two-thirds of its yearly income during the months of October and November, the loss was serious. Compounding the problem, one of the injured workers was a cider house fixture.

  That was why Lily rose at dawn the next morning, put on jeans and her warmest layers, and drove around the lake again. She went all the way up the wide drive this time, turned right after the big house, and followed the road around a bend.

  The cider house was a squat stone building, covered with ivy and surrounded by hemlock, actually pretty for a place of hard work. The insides had been gutted and rebuilt twenty years before to shore up the structure and allow the addition of new equipment. Apart from a larger, more efficient refrigeration unit and a faster bottling system, though, the process of making cider hadn’t changed much since the Blake family had bottled its first quart in this very same spot four generations earlier.

  The instant Lily slipped into the cider house, she was enveloped in the sweet smell of apple. She had come here often as a child, intrigued by the working of the cider press and eager to help. By the time she was sixteen and big enough to do that, she was too busy with music and school. Besides, her father believed that the orchard was man’s work.

  She pictured him, larger than life in a long rubber apron and high rubber boots, fishing an inferior apple from the wash bin and tossing it aside, scooping the rest through the water toward the lift that took them up to the chopper. Another worker, standing on a platform five feet off the ground, ushered them along the conveyor belt and into the chopper. Two other men stood on similar platforms, layering racks and cloths and apple mash one on another until there were eleven layers in all—always eleven, she remembered that.

  “Oh my,” came a voice from behind, and Lily turned to the startled face of Oralee Moore. Oralee was the widow of George’s foreman. It was ironic, given George’s view of women, that Oralee was now Maida’s foreman. Tall and sturdy, with ashy skin and wiry gray hair, she had to be nearing seventy, but she was dressed the same as Lily, ready to work.

  Lily liked Oralee. Even in the worst of earlier times, the older woman had always had a kind smile for her, a compassionate look. She gave both to Lily now—but Lily’s gaze quickly moved past her to the young man entering the cider house on her heels.

  In that instant, Lily realized what she’d done. She had come here to work for many reasons, the most urgent being that Maida needed help, but it had been an instinctive response, with little time to ponder or doubt. Oralee wasn’t a concern; she was loyal and discreet. But the young man behind her was only one of many who would see Lily in the course of a day here. Some lived in the dormitory. Others lived in town. Those others would go home after work and spread the word. Her secret would be out.

  After an initial moment of panic, she suddenly relaxed, a bit surprised to realize that she wasn’t sorry. Her stomach still knotted when she remembered the hounding of the press, but she’d had to face them on her own in Boston. She wasn’t in Boston anymore. She was in Lake Henry. She had been born and raised here, and if the town had treated her poorly once, now was the time for them to make up for that. She was tired of hiding.

  Besides, it was done.

  “How are André and Jacques?” she asked in reference to the injured men.

  Oralee’s mouth went crooked. “They’ll be home in two days, sitting up there in the dorm, pleased as punch to have time off with pay.” She waved the young man into the cider house. “This is Bub. He’s from the Ridge.”

  Bub was tall, solid, and not a day over eighteen. He made such a point of not looking at Lily that she knew that he knew just who she was. Trusting Oralee to tell him anything else he needed to know, she went outside to wait for Maida.

  It was the coolest morning yet. A fine sheen of white, a cross between dew and frost, lay on the hillside grass. Lily leaned against the vine-covered stone, pulled her sleeves over her hands, and tucked them under her arms. Each inhalation brought a bracing reminder of fall. Each exhalation was wispy and white.

  She wondered what was in the Post today. It had been too early to call John when she left. She wondered if he was awake now, if he was on the lake or driving into town. Driving into town, she decided. Basking in the week’s Lake News. She wondered if he had run the pieces she had chosen. It had been fun picking them out, thinking of the pleasure three students would have seeing their work in print. She supposed this was the upside of John’s job, a positive thing for a change.

  Maida came into sight then, rounding the bend in the road, walking up from the main house with her head bowed. Lily straightened, but her mother seemed deep in thought. She was nearly upon her before she finally looked up. Startled, she stopped.

  “You’re short a man,” Lily said. When Maida didn’t respond, she added, “I can help.”

  Still Maida said nothing, and Lily feared she might actually refuse her help. That would be the ultimate punishment, the ultimate insult.

  The verdict remained in doubt when Maida resumed walking. It was only when she held the door open for Lily that Lily had an answer.

  The machines were already warming up—the whirlpool bath, the conveyor belt, the grind, the press—chugging away in an old familiar rhythm. Lily thought of her father again. Hard not to, he was such an indelible part of the scene. Maida wore the rubber apron now, but her presence was almost jarring. Still, she seemed fully in control.

  Lily traded her jacket for a hooded oilcloth slicker, put on oversized boots and long rubber gloves, and climbed up opposite Bub, onto the platform beside the press. She didn’t tell him that she had never done this before, because it didn’t feel that way. She had watched the process hundreds of times as a child, and though the old burlap cloths had been replaced by nylon ones, the latticework racks and the folding technique were exactly the same.

  That didn’t mean she didn’t feel apprehension. But there was anticipation, too. She had waited a long time to do this. In her mind, it was as much a game as a job.

  Within minutes, the bottommost rack was in place, a cloth draped over it with the corners hanging down, and the first apples came through the grind into the large funnel above them. Bub shifted a lever just long enough for the right amount of mash to fall to the cloth, which it did with a splat that made Lily laugh, but she went right to work. She folded the left corner of the cloth up over the mash, waited while Bub folded over his left corner; then she folded her right corner over, waited while Bub folded his right corner over. While he smoothed and straightened the cloth, she picked up the next rack, an identical piece of latticework three feet square. After she had placed it on top of the folded parcel, Bub spread a second cloth there, then pulled the lever, and the next portion of mash splattered down. They alternately folded over the four corners of cloth, straightened the packet, added another rack and another cloth, and let more mash fall.

  The pile of racks and cloths grew. When there were eleven in all, capped by a spare rack, they pushed the whole stack sideways on runners until it was centered under the large iron press. Bub added fat blocks of wood between the top rack and the press to tighten the fit, Maida shifted the lever to start the stacks rising, and what had been a background chug suddenly took on a bite. The gears turned with a rhythmic hum and bang. In no time juice was seeping from the cloth, spilling down the sides of the racks to the reservoir below.

  Lily s
traightened then, looked around in self-satisfied surprise, and let out a breath. She’d done it! She felt exhilarated!

  Maida was turned the other way, back to culling bad apples from the bath, but Oralee was watching. She sent her an understanding smile, then gestured her back to work, and the process began all over again. This time, before the stack of eleven could be pushed under the press, the spent stack was removed—apple dregs tossed into the backhoe at the side door, cloths dropped in a pile for reuse, racks standing against the wall.

  Lily lost count of the number of stacks they built, pressed, and broke down. At one point, Maida started the pump that moved the cider from the reservoir to the large refrigeration unit at the far end of the room. At another, she used her walkie-talkie to call for more apples, then drove the small loader to raise the crates up to the bath. At yet another, she hooked up a hose and washed stray bits of apple and juice down the concrete floor to a central drain.

  The cider house was clean. George had been a stickler for that, and Maida carried on the practice. No amount of washing, though, could erase the smell of fresh apples and sweet juice. It permeated the concrete walls, the floor, the machines. Lily breathed it in deeply. It was heady stuff, conjuring up good things—which was remarkable, when she thought about it. For the most part, the memories of Lake Henry that she had carried with her since leaving were negative. But now she was remembering things like sitting with Poppy and Rose in this very room, scrunched up in the corner near the refrigerator, chomping on apples that George slipped them.

  By the time Maida called a midmorning break, Lily was too pumped up to be tired. She washed off her oilskins and hung everything up, then went down to the main house. She might have used the bathroom at the cider house, but the morning paper wasn’t there.

  It was neatly folded on the large wood table in Maida’s kitchen, a snake lying coiled and silent, with no rattle to tell if it was poisonous or not. Feeling the beginnings of a knot in the pit of her stomach, Lily skimmed the top half of the front page. There was nothing there or, when she turned it over, on the bottom half. And on the inside?

  Rather than opening the paper to check, she went to the phone, and for a minute her hand hovered. Call Cassie, her brain ordered. Cassie was her legal adviser. She was the one who had sent the retraction demand and would surely be looking for a response.

  But she didn’t know Cassie’s number off the top of her head. She did know John’s. She tried his home first, hanging up after three rings so that she wouldn’t get Poppy. She quickly tried the Lake News office. The phone rang three times there, too. Disappointed, she was about to hang up when he answered. He was all business.

  “Lake News. Kipling here.”

  “Hi,” she said, a little breathy.

  His voice warmed. “Hey. I missed your call this morning.”

  “I left early. Mom needed help. She was one short in the cider house.”

  “I heard about the accident.”

  Lily smiled. “I won’t ask how.” Cautiously she said, “I haven’t looked through the paper.”

  “Don’t bother. There’s nothing in it today, either.”

  She felt a letdown. “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  Then anger. “They still owe me an apology.”

  “Cassie will have to drag it out of them.”

  “Do you think they’ve left my apartment?”

  “Probably. There was a murder last night. An activist in the local Republican Party was found stabbed to death in his Back Bay town house. Finger pointers are going wild, alternately accusing two ex-wives, one mistress, a disgruntled business partner, and the mob. That’s a lot of ground to cover. The papers will need all their troops.”

  “So if I return to Boston I’m a nobody again?” she asked, making light of it, but he got the point.

  “Hard to say. Are you in a rush to get back?”

  “My life is there,” she said. “My apartment, my clothes, my piano, my car.” But they were distant, more words than needs just then, especially when Maida wandered into the kitchen. She looked disapproving, which was nothing new. Lily had no doubt that her mother knew who she was talking to, and wondered if she’d been listening for long.

  “I’d better call Cassie,” she told John, and went through Poppy to make that one while Maida filled the teapot.

  Cassie’s paralegal answered, but Cassie came right on after that. “We give them a week,” she said before Lily could ask. “One week. Then we take the next step.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We file suit for defamation of character.”

  Filing suit meant a trial, which would take forever. From the start, Lily hadn’t liked that idea. For the first time now, with her name absent from the Boston papers for two days in a row, she wondered what would happen if two days became three, then five, then ten. She wondered if people would forget. If they did, she might be better to just let the whole thing die.

  Then again, if she was destined to be stared at each time she left the apartment, or followed each time she went to work, or prevented from finding work at all, she couldn’t return to Boston. Her choice would be filing suit, starting a new life incognito somewhere else, or staying here.

  So, then, it was good that orchard workers would see her and spread the word that she was back. She needed to know where she stood.

  CHAPTER 16

  Anna Winslow was the matriarch of the local textile family. She had long since ceded the everyday workings of the mill to her son, Art, but she kept a seat on the board and a small office beside his. Winslow Textiles had been her life for more years than she cared to count. She first became involved with the plant’s operation when her husband, Phipps, began fooling with pretty young weavers on company time, and she had stayed involved out of sheer love for the place. She had no ego. She was content to let Phipps take kudos for progressive thinking, though she was the major force behind it.

  Phipps was retired now. On occasion he strutted through the mill and made noise to simulate command. For the most part, though, he spent his days working with canvas and oil, producing monstrous paintings that only he liked, and which now filled a huge barn behind the house. Anna was contemplating building a second barn for the overflow. She didn’t expect that he would ever sell a one, but Phipps painting was better than Phipps philandering.

  Art was far more Anna’s son than Phipps’s. Though he was only thirty-one, he had been raised at the mill and knew its workings well. Anna trusted him to know when to replace a piece of equipment or retire an outdated design. She trusted his manner with employees and stockholders, and had confidence that if anyone could save a small textile mill in an era of conglomerates, it was Art. She didn’t have to supervise him to know he would do the right thing.

  That freed her to enjoy the sounds of the loom, the smell of the wool, the refraction of light through rooftop windows, the rush of the river under the aged stone. Rarely did a day pass when she wasn’t seen walking among the looms, talking with weavers or leaning over a designer’s shoulder in companionable delight. She had designed many a piece of fabric herself, and had even learned to do it by computer.

  Anna was a round woman with a flair for dressing that canceled out her size. Wearing tunics woven with unique yarns, scarves done in striking patterns, flowing skirts made from the finest threads, she served as a mobile display of the mill’s wares. Art talked numbers with flowcharts and cost sheets; Anna talked style without saying a word. She had the kind of charm that sealed deals, frequently over lunch, for Anna enjoyed her meals. With Phipps holed up at the barn, she was forever on the lookout for a lunch mate. Twice a week there might be buyers in town; another day there would be an employee celebrating a birthday. On this Thursday, there was no one. That was why, when John called to ask her out, she was thrilled to accept.

  “Thursdays are my least favorite days,” she told him as soon as they were seated in his window booth at Charlie’s. “It’s an in-between da
y, not exciting like the start of the week, or wrapping up like the end of the week. I’m so glad you called.” Her eyes shone. She leaned in, a bubble of bridled excitement. “I got word just before I left the office.” She lowered her voice. “Lily Blake is back.”

  John was startled. He had warned Lily that word would get out, but he hadn’t heard about a leak. “How do you know?”

  Anna grinned. “One of our weavers, Minna DuMont? Her husband works at the orchard. He saw Lily at the cider house this morning. She was working with Maida. Working with Maida,” she repeated, marveling. “I called my daughter-in-law to confirm it, and she did. Working with Maida. Can you imagine?”

  “There was an accident—”

  “I know, and Maida needed help, but she and Lily were never ones to work side by side. Not once did the two put their heads together during the celebrations when Art married Rose. There was trouble between them way back.”

  John wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anna was all but begging him to ask. He held off only long enough for Charlie to take their orders, before saying, “How well did you know the Blakes before Art married Rose?”

  “We’ve moved in the same circles for years—though Lord knows why,” Anna added under her breath, “with Phipps and, rest his soul, George so different. But Lake Henry is small, and they had the orchard and we had the mill. Maida entertained a lot in the old days. The house was beautiful, the food was delicious. I didn’t see Lily often. She was kept in the background, except in church. Singing, she had an angel’s voice. But talking? Poor thing, stuttering that way. Maida was horrified.”

  “Horrified for Lily, or for herself?”

  Anna’s full cheeks grew flushed. She whispered, “Both, I’m afraid. She was convinced people blamed her for the stutter.”

  As well they might, John was thinking when Anna said, “It’s entirely physical. Did you know that?”